Experiments

Supporting Innovation in an Internet of Services

Open Access Experiments

BonFIRE has supported many different experiments in our Open Access initiative already, both from academic and industrial organisations. Below you can read a summary of some of the current and past Open Access experiments in BonFIRE.

MODA Clouds Alladin

Atos Research and Innovation, Slovakia, are investigating a multi-Cloud application in BonFIRE that delivers telemedicine health care for patients at home. The application provides an integrated online clinical, educational and social support network for mild to moderate dementia sufferers and their caregivers. The aim of the experiment is to analyse the application behaviour in a multi-Cloud environment and improving its robustness and flexibility for peak load usage.

Sensor Cloud

Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at the National University of Ireland, Galway, came to BonFIRE for testing scalability and stability of a stream middleware platform called Linked Stream Middleware (LSM, developed for the EC-FP7 OpenIoT and Vital projects).

The experiment in BonFIRE utilises multiple sites with sensors generating up to 100,000 streaming items per second consumed by up to 100,000 clients. The data processing modules such as data acquisition and stream processing engines are run on the BonFIRE cloud infrastructure.

SWAN

This is an experiment conducted by SSC Services to analyse how one of their software solutions, SWAN, can handle large amounts of data transferred between business partners under different networking conditions.

SSC Services have utilised the iMinds Virtual Wall site to achieve fine-grained control of the networking conditions in order to identify critical Quality of Service (QoS) thresholds for their application when varying latency and bandwidth. Moreover, investigating possible actions and optimisations to the SWAN components to deal with worsening conditions, to be able to deliver the expected QoS to the business partners.

Parallel DAEM

Having used BonFIRE in the 1st Open Call, the Services Systems Design Group at the University of Manchester returned to do another experiment in our Open Access initiative. The Open Call experiment aimed to determine the conditions for achieving resilient and optimal service compositions on a distributed Cloud infrastructure for the Future Internet.

When performing experiments out of their lab on BonFIRE using multiple geographically distributed sites, some emergent performance phenomena were uncovered for one of their service optimisation algorithms, Dynamic Agent-based Ecosystem Model (DAEM). Open Access has enabled them to continue to investigate those emergent phenomena to take the optimisation algorithm to a more mature stage and applying it to new domains.

ERNET

ERNET India are developing software for moving e-learning services into the Cloud and are using BonFIRE to analyse the benefits of Cloud delivery models, including multi-site deployment. In particular, they investigate fault tolerance.

JUNIPER

BonFIRE also facilitates other research projects, giving access to multiple partners to perform an experiment. One of these projects is the EC-FP7 project JUNIPER (Java Platform for High-Performance and Real-Time Large Scale Data), which deals with efficient and real-time exploitation of large streaming data from unstructured data sources. The JUNIPER platform helps Big Data analytic applications meet requirements of performance, guarantees, and scalability by enabling access to large scale computing infrastructures, such as Cloud Computing and HPC.

In JUNIPER, the BonFIRE Cloud premises are used to initially port pilot applications to a production-like Cloud infrastructure. The JUNIPER experiment benefits from the availability of geographically distributed, heterogeneous, sites and the availability of fine grained monitoring information (at the infrastructure level) to test and benchmark the developed software stack. Another important advantage of BonFIRE to JUNIPER is that some of the sites owning HPC facilities, e.g., HLRS (Stuttgart), provide a transparent access (bridge) from Cloud to HPC, which is of a great importance for JUNIPER experiments.

Automate the Cloud

In a joint research project, the University of Edinburgh and HP Labs has used BonFIRE as part of research into the application of automated planning for Cloud service configurations. The experiment in BonFIRE benefits from the availability of geographically distributed sites to examine the migration of services between Clouds.

BonFIRE Previous Open Call Experiments

BonFIRE has funded experiments in 2 Open Calls and are now supporting unfunded experiments in our Open Access initiative. To find out more about the Open Call experiments, follow the links below.

A multi-site cloud facility for applications, services and systems research and experimentation

The
Internet of Services (IoS) is at the heart of Europe’s vision for the
Future Internet. Value-added connections between people, objects,
infrastructure and content will all be made possible by new service
technologies. Development of successful services can be challenging and
testbeds are an essential part to allow technical and socio-economic
impact to be explored. This is especially true for disruptive
technologies that impact current Internet business models. With the
complexity of infrastructure and usage scenarios increasing the
development of testbeds are increasingly challenging and costly. A new
approach for European test bed provision is needed that moves away from
project and industry specific facilities to general purpose, reusable,
low-cost testing and experimentation services.

BonFIRE is providing a state-of-the art multi-site
cloud facility for applications, services and systems research in the
Internet of Services community. The facility will give researchers
access to large-scale virtualised compute, storage and networking
resources with the necessary control and monitoring services for
detailed experimentation of their systems and applications. The facility
will allow the evaluation of cross-cutting effects of converged service
and network infrastructures and the assessment of socio-economic
impact.

The cloud Service, Platform,
Infrastructure (SPI) layered architectural model underpins the BonFIRE
offer. Testbeds will be provided using IaaS delivery. Easy to use
methodologies, tools and services will support cloud federation, virtual
machine management, service modelling, experiment lifecycle management,
quality of service monitoring and analytics. Some testbed sites will be
federated where multi-site, multi-domain experiments are need. BonFIRE drives excellence in European services research.

Through collaboration and partnerships with
test bed providers, and experimenters, BonFIRE will ensure that Europe
remains at the forefront service technologies.

IoS experimenters are often faced with the question "Why should I use an external facility instead of creating my own testbed?"
This sort of question is riddled with pre-conceptions and concerns
about quality, reliability, loss of control and accountability when
using outsourced services. But BonFIRE is different. The facility is
being built by service providers for service providers and this fact
means that we are deeply aware of the concerns and how to address them.

BonFIRE is about trusted partnership and collaboration: BonFIRE
will bring together experimenters and test bed providers working on
innovative service technologies. The BonFIRE consortium consists of
leading service providers and cloud technologists who will work in
consultation with users of the facility to ensure strong experiment
hypothesis, design and execution

BonFIRE is about state-of-the-art cloud technologies: BonFIRE
does not replace current public cloud offerings but does offer
something different. BonFIRE provide experiments access to heterogeneous
cloud resources with advanced low-level control and monitoring APIs and
the ability to scale beyond current research project testbeds. In
addition, the experimental process is supported by tools that ensure
results are verifiable and reproducible.

BonFIRE is about efficiency: reducing costs allowing researchers to achieve more
by focusing on innovation rather than testbed operations. BonFIRE is
about innovative experiments. BonFIRE’s success is related to the
success of innovative experiments. It’s in BonFIRE's interests to make
this happen and to serve the IoS research community. BonFIRE will work
closely with you to achieve this.

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European